The first half of 2018 didn't see any cloud outages severe enough to be described as breaking the Internet. As can always be expected, however, there were several operational failures that interrupted the business of major enterprises, froze application services providers in their tracks, and annoyed everyday employees and consumers around the world.

Such outages inevitably shake public confidence in the infrastructure that now largely powers the modern enterprise -- from workplace collaboration to logistics to customer engagement.

But given the rapid pace of cloud adoption and data center buildout in recent years, and breakneck innovation that's delivering complex new cloud services, the lack of catastrophic failures in the first half of the year should be taken as a good sign that major providers have mastered the art of uptime.